so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started learning morse back in the spring mostly because i wanted to try QRP operating and everyone said CW was the way to go for weak signal stuff. got up to around 5wpm pretty quick with the basic character recognition stuff but then just kind of hit a wall and stayed there for like 3 months.

i know the characters now, i can copy them if someone sends reaaaally slow, but the moment i try to push the speed up even a little it all falls apart and i start having to spell out letters in my head which i know is the wrong way to do it. ive been using the lcwo website and some of the G4FON software but honestly not sure if im doing the right exercises or just spinning my wheels.

curious what actually made the difference for people who went through this. did you just force yourself to copy at higher speeds even when you were missing stuff? or is there some specific practice routine that worked? i feel like im close to something clicking but cant quite get there

yeah the wall you're hitting around 5-7 wpm is super common and there's actually a reason for it — at those speeds your brain has just enough time to sound out each dit-dah pattern consciously, but once you go faster that strategy completely breaks down and you have to rewire how you're processing it. the trick that got me through it was the Farnsworth method but used kind of aggressively. i'd set the character speed to like 18-20wpm but the word spacing way out so i had extra time between characters. that way your ear learns what the letter actually sounds like at real speed but you still have a moment to write it down.

also honestly the biggest thing for me was just copying real QSOs off the air, even when i was only getting maybe 30-40% of it. there's something about real operators sending with natural rhythm and the occasional mistake that trains your ear differently than any software. tune around 40m in the evenings around 7.050-7.125 and just copy whatever you can, dont stress about what you miss. after a few weeks of that i noticed my brain starting to just know the characters without thinking about it, which is exactly what you want.

patience is the main thing though, it really does just click one day and then you wonder what you were struggling with

im kind of in the same boat as you so maybe not the most useful reply lol but i found the Koch method on LCWO helped me more than anything else once i stopped cheating and actually kept the speed set high. i kept dropping it down when i got frustrated which i think just made things worse. my elmer told me to sit with the discomfort of missing stuff and thats been better advice than i expected honestly. also the Just Learn Morse Code app has some decent word practice if youre tired of random character groups, copying actual words felt way more motivating to me than QSO practice strings